Netsanet Gebremichael earned her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Social Studies from the Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University in Uganda in 2019. Her academic career includes her role as an assistant professor and researcher at Addis Ababa University’s Institute of Ethiopian Studies. From April 2010 to November 2012, Gebremichael served as director of Addis Ababa University’s Gender Office, where she initiated several projects, including a Gender Resource Center, an IT lab, and a library for disadvantaged students.
As the 2021 Fatema Mernissi Postdoctoral Fellow in Social and Cultural Studies at The Africa Institute, Gebremichael’s research focuses on memory, archival studies, and historical and cultural documentation practices, particularly through oral history projects. Her research includes the first phase of a project documenting women’s oral recollections of the 1977 famine in Ethiopia, as well as a monograph based on an oral history study of intergenerational perspectives on the era of Emperor Haile Selassie.
Her work also includes documentation of women in the Ethiopian Student Movement from 1950 to 1978, conducted through the Global Research Network Grant managed by SOAS University of London from 2019 to 2021. This research resulted in an archival exhibition titled Kibibilosh, which she curated at the Modern Art Museum: Gebre Kristos Desta Center in Addis Ababa from May 7 to July 28, 2021.
Her publications include “Mapping the Notion of the Transnational: A Close Reading of the ‘Women’s Question’ from the Ethiopian Student Movement’s Publications in the 1960s and 1970s” (2023); “PPPs Meet the Developmental State: The Case of Ethiopia,” a chapter in Corporate Capture of Development (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023), which was adapted into a podcast and an animated film; “Oral Memories of the 1977 Famine in Ethiopia,” published in Transition, issue 133 (2022); “Ambivalent Memories of Imperial Legacies: Asmara as ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Segregationist’ from Ethiopia,” published in the Journal of Cultural Studies (2020); and “Travel Writing as an Empirical Mode of Knowing: A Methodological Critique of James Bruce’s Travels and Adventures in Abyssinia,” published in MISR Review (2019).
Gebremichael’s fellowship research includes a book manuscript titled Tizita’s Path to Reckoning: Reminiscing Asmara from Ethiopia, 1998–2018, based on her Ph.D. dissertation, as well as a monograph on women in the Ethiopian Student Movement from 1950 to 1978.
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